Thursday, May 28, 2009

Website Optimization: Making It Accessible

By Adam Webster

What many people do not realize is that every time you visit a website, you download its contents to your computer. There are many people who swear up and down that they will never download a file when in truth they already have. This is where website optimization comes in.

In doing this, a person's visit to a website will be made much more tolerable and may even guarantee return visits.

The first thing you can do is reduce the size of images. Images often take up the most space on a web, and even though they are required to enhance the overall user experience, there are steps that you can take to ensure that they download properly on the user end. In the old days the trick was to reduce the amount of colors in the image, but in today's world that just won't work. The best thing you can do is use a graphic design program to convert all of your web images to.png. This format is extremely small, and is perfect for website content.

If you want to host any type of video for a website then you should, but you should also do your best to keep it off the main server. Putting it onto your main server will cause serious problems, like causing many people to have to wait for the video AND the website itself to load. If you can stream your video from alternative servers then you will find that it's a lot easier to load the other content. The only problem with this is that you need to constantly make sure that the links to the streaming video are all functioning properly.

If you are finding that you are receiving more traffic that you had thought then you should also go ahead and distribute your content out amongst various servers. In this you can be sure that content is streamed by the server that has the least load meaning that users will get their page up as quickly as possible.

Physical downloads such as games, music, or other software must be allocated to different servers. Some servers can be designated as 'premium' servers and people who pay a monthly fee can be given access to increased speeds and additional content.

If you really feel its necessary you can use some SEO or what is known as keyword optimization. This is where you use words that are popular in search engine within your page or in the meta tags. By doing this you will ensure that those who search for those keywords on a search engine will see your website in the list, and as more people click on it, it will make it's way upward in the rankings.

Setting up a decent website is never hard, though optimizing it so that it will be usable can be. To easy the pain of this difficult process you can employ the help of a professional or seek out one of the many tutorials on the internet. However you do it, so long as you keep performance in mind, you're certain to have a decent website.

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